Pink Hair by Geoffrey Waring

       For many, it was the summer of the pandemic. For others, a summer of American unrest and protests.

       For me, it was the summer Hana Kimura died.

       Maybe you know who she is, and maybe you don’t. She was a 22-year-old Japanese professional wrestler and reality TV star who committed suicide on May 23, 2020. May she rest in peace.

       This is not a story about her. This is a story about masks.

       This is the story of the summer I was haunted by the life and death of a professional wrestler I knew nothing about. You might call it a ghost story, but there isn’t a ghost, per se. Just a real person who came to me through a series of artifacts, in videos, interviews, and wrestling matches, mostly found on the internet, after the fact of her death.

       Hana Kimura had glowing features, a muscular, pro wrestler’s body, and bright pink hair. It was the pink hair that caught my eye, and the pink eyebrows to match. It was distinctive, and she wore it well.

       Kimura was on a show called Terrace House, which is like The Real World but in Japanese, and considered by its fans to be substantially gentler. It focused on mundane events in the lives of six rotating, attractive, and camera-ready twenty-somethings. They ate delicious-looking home-cooked meals, went to their day jobs, dated each other sometimes, and dreamed about the future. They had minor arguments, the kind you might have with a college roommate, and generally worked them out through respectful dialogue. To its admirers it was a peaceful, introverted oasis in a turbulent world. 

       I learned about Kimura’s death from a New York Times article:

       After Reality Star’s Death, Japan Vows to Rip the Mask Off Online Hate

       Everyone said not to read the news, but we were all shut up indoors, so it was impossible not to. At the same time, everyone was absolutely right. We should not have been reading the news. 180,000 dead Americans by late August. Did it matter that they were Americans? I’d never been one to care about those headlines—“Six Americans Among 300 Dead in Plane Crash.” I always thought, what about the other 294? But this time felt different. It seemed to be mostly Americans dying. This was a plague Americans had brought upon themselves, but borne mostly by the innocent, like the unrelated passengers in a plane crash that God uses to punish a man for cheating on his wife.

        Pink hair was all around me. We weren’t supposed to go out, but after a month or so, everyone did.

        It was pandemic hair, they said. Why not try bangs? Why not cut it short, in the bathroom at home? Why not dye it a wild color? No one’s going to see you for months. Why not try something new?

       Everywhere I went I saw them: girls with pink hair, with pink eyebrows. Was I imagining it? 180,000 dead Americans and counting, and still they were burning masks on the beaches, chanting for freedom from a simple life-saving courtesy. It was all very hard to visualize, so instead my brain kept visualizing the ghost of a dead wrestler.

        Why could I not shake this person out of my brain? Did I actually know anything about her? I used to watch professional wrestling when I was in high school, and I knew a good wrestler when I saw one. She was athletic and muscular, vicious and technical, and she could cut a great promo. Her mom had been a professional wrestler, too, and a damn good one. Hana would mock her opponents for being ugly to rile up the crowd, like a good heel. She would report that they were about to lose to a real cutie.

       Her intro music was “Internet Friends” by Knife Party. You blocked me on Facebook, a voice said as the lights in the arena dimmed. And now you’re going to die.

        She came to the ring in colorful greens and blues and pinks, and unlike the idiots in Orange County and Daytona Beach, she was wearing a mask. A big, futuristic gas mask, and holding a giant squirt gun.

        Sorry. This is not a story about her. This is a story about masks. This is a story about 180,000 dead Americans.

        Well. Maybe it’s a little bit about her, too.

        180,000 dead Americans is hard to visualize. It was so much easier to visualize one muscular girl, whose job was pulling arms off in the ring, sitting in her room at night and reading internet comments calling her a gorilla. Telling her to go die. Telling her the world would be better off if she just disappeared.

        And then she did—she just disappeared.

       “Every day, I receive nearly 100 honest opinions and I cannot deny that I got hurt,” she wrote. “Thank you for giving birth to me, Mom. I wanted to be loved in life.”

       A picture with her kitten. “I love you, please live a long and joyful life. I’m sorry.”

       Hana and her gasmask. Cause of death: a mis-washed wrestling costume. On the show, there had been a staged fight with her roommate over the costume, which was left in the wash. As in the wrestling ring, Hana was asked to play the villain. She played it well. She was a professional.

       Internet trolls descended on her by the thousands. Japan was on lockdown, just like the rest of the world. Alone, isolated, unable to go out, a terrible virus ravaging the planet. In America, people baked bread, they took up a hobby, they watched Tiger King. I don’t know what they did in Japan. But somewhere, across the country, across the world, an army of sad, ugly men—as I imagine them—feeling lonely and rejected, furious and entitled, living in their parents’ spare bedrooms and eating instant ramen, swarmed to the shores of Hana’s consciousness to give their “honest opinions.”

       They murdered her.

       They snuffed out a talented wrestler at the beginning of her career. They snuffed out a beautiful and kind young woman who had joined a reality TV show looking for love.

       Who spends time locking onto a target and unloading their hatred like gasoline into a car tank? They were faceless and nameless, but I could make out their shadows in my mind’s eye.

       They’d accomplished their goal and then they’d receded, free of consequence, back into obscurity. Like an army of mole people who retreat to the mountain; like a pack of sea monsters who wash back into the ocean. Vicious as poison, anonymous as seaweed.

       “Imagine if this pandemic had happened 20 years ago,” a popular meme said, showing the picture of an old Nokia dumbphone. “We’d be stuck in our houses with dial-up modems and board games.”

       The internet had given these people a way out from the murky depths, dripping wet like pirates, half-human. They burned masks on the beaches of San Diego (682 dead by the end of August), in the K-mart parking lots of Kansas City (77 dead). They rushed into Walmarts and Krogers, emboldened and secure in the knowledge of each other, fueled by conspiracy blood. If they were asked to put on their masks, they would smash windows, throw items at underpaid cashiers, knock over shopping carts. They weaponized their coughs, weaponized the very breath of life.

       Their worlds were hard to picture, even though I saw videos of them every day. They were harder to picture than 180,000 dead Americans that summer.

       Hana was easy to picture. They had captured the last six months of her life on a reality show.

       The show claimed to have “no script at all,” but after Hana’s suicide, we learned that wasn’t true. It was, after all, reality TV. Producers interfered, they orchestrated spontaneous conversations, they encouraged the cast members to play roles. Some came out as heroes, some as villains. And the fans gathered online, on sites like Reddit and Facebook, to criticize and praise, to judge and indulge themselves vicariously in the lives of other people. To let their voices be heard.

      How much pleasure did it give them? 

     Hana Kimura wrestled at 128 pounds. How much does a hit of endorphins from sending a mean comment to a girl who suddenly became a celebrity weigh? What is the accumulated weight of those endorphins, of the serotonin and adrenaline from tacking nasty messages onto the droopy, bloated underbelly of the internet?

      You blocked me on Facebook. Now you’re going to die.

      Wearing a mask prevents you from spreading the disease to other people, but it doesn’t protect you from getting the disease yourself. It’s a simple courtesy, a choice not about your own tolerance for risk but of reducing the potential harm you are doing to others.

       180,000 dead Americans that summer. Spring break in Miami (2,403 dead), barbecues in Houston (2,188 dead). And now you’re going to die.

       I never watch old episodes of her reality show, but sometimes I watch her old matches. Hana was incredibly strong. She could pick up a woman twice her size and suspend her in the air for half a minute before coming crashing down to the mat.

       The wrestler Kairi Sane was living in Orlando (375 dead) when she saw the tweets, the pictures of Hana’s bloody wrists broadcast over the internet for everyone to see. She called the wrestler Jungle Kyona in Japan, who went to check on Hana, but it was already too late.

       Dead at 22.

      Some numbers are too terrible to fathom. 1997. 2020. 22. 180,000. They swirl together in my mind. They are so full of terrible meaning that the human brain rejects them, strips them of their horror.

     “I have an announcement,” Hana said on camera in the Fall of 2019. “I’m moving into Terrace House.”

      Jungle Kyona and Konami squealed in mock surprise and delight. It couldn’t have been much of a shock: the conversation was being filmed by a full camera crew.

      “Can you handle it?” they asked.

      “I don’t know,” Hana admitted, before bursting into a peal of excited laughter.

       I try not to be part of the problem, but here I am, missing someone I’ve never even met. How much does that weigh? Does it weigh good or does it weigh evil?

       I stopped seeing pink hair everywhere by September. One day people will even stop dying from this virus, in spite of the thousands who conspired to keep it going.

      And once in a while I still think of Hana, who went on a TV show looking for love and, instead, was murdered by thousands of anonymous men on the internet. 

      “People think pro wrestlers are strong. We are physically strong. But once we leave the ring, us wrestlers are the girliest of girls,” Jungle Kyona opined to Hana in Episode 29. “We want to be protected. We want to be hugged.”

      “I want someone to wrap their arms around my broad shoulders,” Hana replied, clearly elated that someone understood her.

       How easy she is for me to visualize, even today, her pink hair, her eyebrows, her bright laugh. How much more present than the woman intentionally coughing on a clerk in rural Ohio (4,128 dead), how infinitely more important than the collective weight of those sniping in the dark anonymity of the digital night. When I think of Hana, I feel a flicker of the antidote inside me, a small taste of the vaccine against all of this. There is a light inside me that dries up the salt and converts their anonymity into nothingness.

      Kindness and compassion are outnumbered, but they are so much more powerful. One side attacks like zombies, hurling bodies against the doors of a fortified mall. The other side is subtler, but it stays with you. It comes to you in small moments. It changes you. It inspires stories and essays.

      The pink hair I saw everywhere from May to September 2020 is gone but the residue of that summer remains.

      Hana flexes a giant bicep and brings her opponent down to the mat with a devastating suplex. The referee counts to three. Hana lifts her hands into the air. She has won.

Geoffrey Waring is a writer and translator whose work has been featured in Litro Magazine, MonkeyBicycle, and Fugue. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.